Going overboard with Adaptational Tropes?

There are a number of new "Adaptation changes aspect X" drafts to be found on TLP like:

• Adaptation Death Change
• Adaptational Ability
• Extraneous Adaptation Inclusion
• Adaptational Mundanity
• Adaptational Ghost
• Adaptational Weight Loss
• Book Adaptation Fake Ending
• Late Appearance In The Adaptation
• Adaptational Uniqueness
• Adaptational Location Change
• Adaptation Age Change
• Adaptation Name Change

I get it, it's fun to pick up on those changes and gush/rant about it but do we really have to trope this level of detail when it comes to creative adjustments to source material? There is no shortage of aspects that can be changed so we probably could do this exercise ad infinitum.

I imagine 10 years from now, each derivative work page will start with a list of 10 to 20 tropes dealing with those changes. The alternative would be to lump these things under a common Adaptational Changes trope.

Should we put a cap on the practice of spreading out aspect alterations into separate tropes? Discuss.

Edited by eroock on Nov 11th 2018 at 9:23:26 PM

Adaptation Deviation is the supertrope and index to all these. (Ironically, it was made long after many adaptation tropes that we have.)

A few of those are redundant with existing tropes, such as Age Lift and Setting Update.

That's not irony. That's normal.

What I wonder about is whether they're actually trivia. The change requires both the original and the change as part of the trope, which means that without the original, it's not a trope.

On the other hand, the creative process of using of the trope is entirely in the new work, and the trope is still entirely within the franchise.

For that reason, I wonder if it's not an idea to group franchise tropes together, since they're not relevant when you look at individual works in themselves, but they are important when it comes to creating the franchise.

For the record, the only official policy on the wiki regarding the banning of a certain subtype of tropes is No New Stock Phrases, at least that I'm aware of. There is a "strongly discouraged" attitude of adding certain deliberate YMMV tropes (ie Eyepatch Scrappy: Character hated for wearing an eyepatch), vapid cataloging of memes or tropes centered around things like porn, but for the most part we don't put embargoes on broad topics. If it passes TLP and general trope standards it should be good to go.

The thing is adaptations end up being intrinsically connected to the parent work in some way. Putting up boundaries of "it isn't evident in this singular installment and so it is trivia" would mean things like Foreshadowing, Continuity Nod and Character Development would also be trivia since it usually requires more context than just the singular installment. Audience are usually expected to be aware of the source material much like they are expected to be aware of the previous movie. I have long thought that things like advertising should be trivia since they are disconnected from the direct narrative of the work, but that is a different topic.

I would say having Adaptational Tropes is fine as long as said "trope" involves the meaning and context of something being altered to fit an adaptation. For example: A character who just happens to be taller in the movie than they are in the book, with their height meaning nothing for either work, isn't relevant. A character who is a year older in a story heavily dependent on age and birthday is, because it changes something for them in the adaptation.

Foreshadowing, Continuity Nod, and Character Development are all completely contained within the same continuity. Adaptations are explicitly different works in that manner. They're not in the same continuity.

The argument, "it isn't evident in this singular installment and so it is trivia" is pretty crap. How evident something is is completely irrelevant, since that depends entirely on the audience, and not what the creator actually puts in the work.

The distinction there is pretty much whether it's deliberate or chance that the change happened. Tropes have a meaning, and if the change doesn't have a meaning, it's not a trope. So I agree with you.

Exactly. If a change wasn't done intentionally, it's not noteworthy, unless by chance it unintentionally changes the story. It's the changes to the story that matters, not the change itself.

Continuity itself is often in flux between Continuity Snarl, Continuity Drift and Series Continuity Error. That's why I feel that the conveyed narrative is more important, you read a book and watch the movie version and notice differences. Functionally, it's the same as watching two different episodes of a television series.

One problem I have with those Adaptation Deviation tropes is that they are mostly not representing new tropes but take existing tropes and mold them onto some existing material. Like "Adaptational Weight Loss" maybe be done because of Ability over Appearance or Adaptational Attractiveness. Or Adaptation Name Change was done to add a Meaningful Name. An "Adaptational Ghost" is basically the same creative decision as The Ghost just done at a later step in the "pipeline". Or "Adaptational Mundanity" is an attempt of Demythification. We are deluding ourselves by creating new tropes because it happened in an adaptation instead of looking for the underlying reason such changes happen. It's the same creative process that went into the change from first draft to final outcome of the source material.

Another problem with those tropes is that they attract examples that lack insight into why the change happened. Just look at the Anime section onAdaptation Age Change. It's like with those meaningless appearance tropes which we cut.

Well foremost you are talking exclusively about Trope Launch Pad, not tropes that are actually being made and launched into the main wiki. All you're really doing is complaining about trope proposals, whereas No New Stock Phrases came about because people were making dozens of meaningless one-liners.

In addition, a lot of troping is about finding gaps in the examples that are not covered by existing tropes. For example, I created Adaptational Badass because I saw a lot of examples in Took a Level in Badass being applied to adaptations and saw it as misuse since the trope is supposed to be about Character Development (meets Training Montage). The wiki is all about the examples and they were not aligning with each other because of that usage. Finding new tropes helps clarify any underlying reason these things happen. If a trope gets launched that generally means it is deemed a unique and valuable idea to add to the wiki.

I would argue that the narrative purpose for making a character badass in an original work is not different from why they may be turned into badass in an adaptation (unless it was done simply to play with the audience's expectation). So there was no new trope found. Just a Badass example moved into an Adaptational Badass category. As mentioned before, we could continue doing this on end without actually having described a fundamentally new trope.

Edited by eroock on Nov 12th 2018 at 8:14:34 PM

What is your argument? All you've said is "I disagree" with nothing added to it. I've said that a character becoming stronger via Training Montage is different from a character changed from non-action to badass in the adaptation. What makes those two examples the same thing?

While I agree that some of them (Ghost, Weight Loss) don't really add anything new to the table (and in the case of Weight Loss don't mean anything in the same way the discarded draft "Adaptational Height Change" didn't), and the rest I'm apathetic towards because I can see reasons to have them and not have them, others (like Adaptational Badass) I can live with mostly because the trope they came from, Took a Level in Badass, is about continuity and character development while Adaptational Badass is at least an interesting choice the creators made with a character between adapting a work and I think it's more noteworthy than most other Adaptational Tropes.

Again, my biggest care is that these tropes are actually noteworthy and actually change the meaning in some way, a creative decision to change something, rather than just something that happens.

4 deadly words: Case by case basis.